Satisfied with his answer [as to how he was feeling], Dickerson then went on to question him about his neighbor’s motivation for attacking him. “You haven’t talked about the motivation for this, but…in politics today, things have gotten a little uglier. Was that apart of what happened here and do you talk about that with your colleagues?” he asked. Paul replied by telling Dickerson that his colleagues really care about deterring others from engaging in a similar attack in the future. “You know, my colleagues come up all the time, and they want to make sure that there is some kind of deterrence because people don’t want to think that it’s open season on our elected officials,” he explained. Paul also pushed back against those who are “obsessed” with the attacker’s motivation. “I think one of the things about motivation is that some of the people got obsessed — some in the media — about the motivations, but…we usually don’t ask if someone’s raped or mugged — why the person did it,” [actually they do, as whack-a-do as that is] he pointed out. “We want punishment and deterrence,” he continued, adding,”and I guess that’s what I’m mostly about. I just don’t think of any kind of motivation or justification, whether it’s political or personal, to attack someone who’s unaware from behind in their own yard.”

Greater is He that is in you, than he that is in the world. 1 John 4:4